Timing
Posted on April 9, 2008
Filed Under Anxiety, Blogroll, My Better Half, bat-ass crazy, bitching and moaning, career, debt, marriage | 11 Comments
So what does a twice rejected nascent writer do after the receiving the latest in a series of loud and echoing No’s? Well, of course she gets right back in the saddle and fires off a few short stories to five different literary magazines and makes sure she enters a couple writing contests and decides that she didn’t really want to go to creative writing school anyway because why should she have to pay some published professor to allow her to write in their esteemed presence? Instead, she will find someone to pay her to write which, while not the point of this writing thing, would be nice and might save her having to go back to landscape design or waitressing or prostitution. (She will get around to being this kind of optimistic and assertive just as soon as she’s finished licking wounds and taking a full moment to recover from her disappointment because right now it’s all coming down around her shoulders. And while she feels like making absolutely no decisions in her current fragile state it would seem that Her Better Half would pick this very week to discuss refinancing the house and her need to go back to work and otherwise kick her while she’s down because what’s a little disappointment without someone around to say,
“Okay, are you satisfied NOW that you’ll never get paid to write? Because it’s good time to give up that pipe dream and go get yourself a real job that starts at 9 and ends at 2 and allows for teacher-work days and sick-kid days and whole weeks off while I travel to glamorous places like Cincinnati and Pittsburgh and gives you the summers free so we don’t have to pay for childcare and of course offers dental and benefits because, after all, such a job that pays more than $9 an hour must exist, you just haven’t looked hard enough, in fact you haven’t looked at all.”
From her defensive crouch, she shot back,
“Right, sorry, I must have been too busy preparing meals and supervising homework and completing Ben Franklin projects and schlepping our kids to piano and baseball and tennis and coaching soccer and making sure there’s food in the fridge and paying all the bills on time and shoveling the back porch and mowing the lawn and stripping wallpaper and painting the interior of the entire fucking house and posting five days a week on my blog and writing a novel and volunteering in the each child’s classroom and helping Gladys pay her rent to have properly looked for a job that could fit nicely into the 15 minutes of me-time I enjoy on the couch each night post-8 p.m. when the kids have been bathed and read to and tucked in multiple times and the cat has finished vomiting up a hairball on the carpet and the five loads of daily laundry are folded and put away because that’s exactly when I feel like kicking it into high gear and getting off my lazy ass to go out and earn myself a living because all this other stuff is just joy and sunshine, hardly a day at all.”
She can tell that today is going to require some serious house cleaning therapy. The Windex is out, the murky glass just asking for a good spring shining. Did she mention that all of her friends, neighbors and acquaintances pay $300 twice a year to have their windows cleaned? She’ll let that fact speak for itself.
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